Harney Lecture Series: Studying War and Migration: A Knotting Causality Approach. The Case of Ukraine.

This talk was based on an essay that performs two chores. The first is formulation of an approach, that of knotty causality, of utility for the analysis of the relationship between warfare and migration. The argument develops as follows: first there is presentation of the knotty causality approach; then application of it to the current war in the Ukraine, which has provoked massive migration; and, finally, specification of an explanatory virtue of knotty causality.

 

The knotty causality approach is formulated as a ‘fastener’ solution to the problem of ‘constant conjunction’ arising from David Hume’s understanding of causality. The analysis of the Ukraine war deals with a controversy in current geopolitical politics regarding competition between the US and Russian informal imperial powers. On the one hand, the war is condemned as an utterly ‘unprovoked’ act of imperial aggression by Russia against Ukraine. On the other hand, it is judged to be an understandable response to decades long implementation of a US imperial policy of ‘NATO-to-the-Border’.  A virtue of examining this controversy in knotty causality terms is that it allows one to speak truth to power -a bit more truthfully- and to understand the migratory immiseration of millions of Ukrainians as the implementation of imperial design.